STAMP is the natural evolution of Little Less Known (which you’ll know all about from last week’s blog). Our aim has always been to help people discover the independents, or at least the best locations for enjoying coffee, culture, cocktails – whatever. But the limitations of three guys and a camera became apparent pretty quickly. Add into the mix the fact that we all had jobs (or university) and you can understand why our content was fairly…well…intermittent.

So we sat down, put our heads together and started to develop the ideas that would eventually turn into STAMP. These meetings often degenerated into drinking beer and watching YouTube, but in amongst the cat videos and YouTuber vlogs we actually did some work. The key, we believed, was to provide people with a really easy way to discover cool locations near them. But what would make STAMP unique? Well we're still working on that. There was a tonne of functionality we wanted, so we quickly realised it was all about prioritising what should be developed first. If we could provide users with these exciting tools, we could sit back and watch the community grow.

“Awesome”, we thought. Let's start building this thing. And we would have done just that. Except none of us knew a thing about how to build an app. One of us was working through some ‘Treehouse’ courses (well worth checking out if you want to get into coding), but our skill base on this front was limited. What was more annoying was that we didn’t actually have any close-ish friends with expertise in this area. (Not that we don't have any friends...we have lots of friends, honest)

We wanted advice. Someone to tell us what was realistic, what was reasonable and what was affordable. So we googled the people behind some of our favourite discovery apps and tried to make contact. The problem was, at this early stage, we were pretty precious about our concept. We didn’t want to divulge too much information to people we didn’t know. Maybe this was a bit naïve, but we were wary of people running off with our idea!

Despite holding our cards close to our chests, we learnt enough. Enough to know that we wanted a developer to join the founding team. If we could sell the concept of STAMP to someone willing to take a punt on a bunch of amateurs, we might actually be able to get this thing off the ground.

And with this plan in mind, it just so happened that the contact we needed would come from someone fairly close to home…